AI token austerity when
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
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Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#62I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…
> I'd much rather hire a junior engineer who spends $100-$200/month I'd much rather hire a junior engineer at $1.20/hour too! Can you hook me up with your contract services provider? Obviously I know you're talking about AI costs only. But the idea of doing that analysis without looking at the salary of the person running the tool seems to be completely missing the point. Now, sure, there are legitimate arguments to…
> But, no, $100k/year absolutely doesn't need to be "justified" if it works. That's cheaper than the alternative, and markedly so.
If you're trying to say that 100k is less than 200k, you're right.
I don't see how any of that won't need to be justified. You can spend a lot of money and not get enough of a return...
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
They keep forgetting to put "make no mistakes", "think deeply" and "get it right the first time" in their prompts. When people have no ability to understand what they are doing, they will just rerun it endlessly hoping they get something passable. When that doesn't happen they burn money.
I doubt most of this is from rerunning the same prompts over and over. This token burn is more likely from people using swarms of agents and orchestrators for “efficiency”. “I’ve got 2 dozen agents churning through the backlog to build this feature that would take one agent an hour to implement.”
managers call meetings and agents call swarms.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works? That is exactly what they are doing, yes
That's my take as well. I've had my unPRed branches grabbed up and blindly merged by an agent twice now. The guy doing it was shocked both times that his PR had my change sets in it. Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did". Edit: To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I…
To that last guy, as the manager I would say "What is it that you do here??"
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works? That is exactly what they are doing, yes
That's my take as well. I've had my unPRed branches grabbed up and blindly merged by an agent twice now. The guy doing it was shocked both times that his PR had my change sets in it. Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did". Edit: To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I…
So he's being paid and is sitting there letting an AI tool do his work for him? Insanity.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your fictional world you hire a junior who will write code manually, right? First , I interview people, Junior skills in manual coding dropped sharply this year. These are people who started they school manual and switched mid-course. In two years there will be no such people. well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves, especially for juniors. Junior that writes good code…
> well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves The bubble is an echo chamber.
I'm interviewing juniors. Their manual skills drops sharply, and that's for people who went to school in manual age, and maybe last year it stopped to be manual. Lets see what will be in a year or two lol
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#67> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.
I don't understand this critique. (1) Did you previously think you weren't getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do, aka what THEY thought was productive? (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless? Edit: y'all are some whiney folk, ain't ya?
1) I think if the company I work for spends too much effort on things that aren't going to make money, they won't be able to pay me anymore, no matter what they "think" is productive. That's not how executives at companies like this make decisions, though.
2) Mostly, yes.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#68I think as it becomes more common for executives to think we can replace software engineering with agents, I wonder if they might be basing their decisions off of unrealistic perceptions of the average software engineer. I guess I'm mulling two somewhat contradictory senses:
1. You get out of it what you put into it. A savvy CTO might be incredibly excited by everything they can do with agents, and improperly think that all the software engineers can do the same thing, when in reality your org's average software engineers might not have the creativity to even think of many cases where it could save them work. So by mandating agent usage, you might find that productivity hasn't improved while AI costs have increased.
2. When using AI, there are two gaps that become more obvious. First is the gap of: who tells the agent what to do? In many orgs, product isn't technically savvy enough to come up with a detailed spec/plan that LLM can use. And many cog-in-machine developers aren't positioned to come up with the spec, they just want to implement it. By expecting work to be implemented by agent-using developers, you might instead find a lot of idle workers waiting for work to show up. Second is the qa/review cycle. You've introduced a big change to the org but are you really saving cost or shifting it?
I'm all for introducing LLM as optional to help existing developers increase velocity and quality, but I think the "let's restructure the org" movement is really dicey, especially for mid-size or smaller employers.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#69I love how these articles drop, and all of a sudden HN is filled with people who think engineering productivity is simple to measure. Yes, productivity implies revenue (or cost reduction), and revenue is measurable. However: 1. You spend money today to build features that drive revenue in the future, so when expenses go up rapidly today, you don’t yet have the revenue to measure. 2. It’s inherently a counterfactual c…
If it were 10x productive you'd be able to measure it indirectly, you'd be unable to avoid measuring it. So the initial claims were clearly lies. The research question is:
Is it >1.0x productive?
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#70I know I'm responding to AI right now, but > which means figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale. If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.
Not every change a developer makes increases revenue, and the changes that do often have a lag time.